Wondering how to increase organic traffic to your blog posts? There’s several ways you can increase your organic traffic; and depending on your particular niche and the relative competition, this can be a little challenging!
In a competitive niche, there are lots of competing websites for your content. But in those areas with less competition, you can do this more easily. Google uses a number of criteria to determine how to judge a particular piece of content. If your content is good, more people will read it and link to it. More backlinks is one of the major ranking criteria for Google. But it all starts with quality content.
Backlinks too can vary. A backlink from a high authority relevant website has more weight with Google than those from a low quality site, or one in a different niche to your own. Other factors determine your rankings too; what you title your articles, keywords within it, how people relate to it and the content length and quality.
Google has many ranking factors and their exact algorithm is always changing. One thing is for sure, you need quality content. Bad quality content will have visitors leaving within seconds and Google “bots” can see this and rank your content (and therefore website) accordingly.
How To Increase Organic Traffic To Your Blog – Search Engines
You therefore should strive to create some quality content on your blog. Traffic can be found from Google, Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo and other search engines. Google however has the lion share of traffic. What content should you create? Ideally choose your content topics wisely. If and when your content does attract the attention of the search engines, you’ll want your visitors to be the right kind of visitors. Therefore it’s wise to start out with visitor intent, and knowing your target audience – see how to know your target market.
Getting your content wrong might attract the wrong audience – who won’t buy whatever you’re selling. So start with customer intent and your product or service. Create content which answers relevant questions your target audience might want to know. You can use Google’s free keyword planner to find longer tail keywords which target your audience and give you more opportunity for being found.
how to increase organic traffic to your blog – Long Tail Keywords
Once you have found a long tail keyword and checked it for competition, you can start creating some content around it, if appropriate. Long tail keywords have less competition in the organic search results than their shorter tail counterparts. So it can be a good idea to create lots of content around long tail keywords within your niche.
Some of them will fail to get traction but others can make their way to the top of the search engines and get you free traffic; particularly if you put some effort in and create some awesome content. Before you do however, you should get a free plugin which will help you with your SEO (search engine optimisation). I use a plugin called Yoast SEO – get it here.
An SEO plugin will help you write your content with the keyword you choose in mind. It also helps you to place your keyword in images, alt tags, headings, sub headings, tags and throughout your content. Too much over optimisation, and the search engines will find your content spammy, not enough and they won’t flag it for your chosen keyword/s.
How Much, How Often?
Blogging is definitely a long term strategy for getting traffic to your blog. The more often you blog and the longer you keep it up for, the better! I recently read that once you have over 400 blog posts you should see a jump in your traffic. Before you are established though, Google may put you in what’s called the “sandbox”.
This is a period of time which it will hold back new websites from ranking highly in the search engines. Google hasn’t confirmed the sandbox but many SEO experts believe it exists as a filter for newcomers and spammers, and to maintain a high quality of content in the searches it provides to users.
So as you build your content don’t get caught up in checking with Google every time you post an article. Just keep going and eventually your regular posting will pay off. You may start seeing your content rank in the lesser used search engines such as Bing, Yahoo and Duckduckgo in the meantime.
Marketing Your Content Yourself
But don’t wait for Google to rank your content, as it might never happen. Give it the best chance by marketing it yourself!
Another great plugin I use is called Revive Old Posts. This free plugin lets you automatically post your content through your social media platforms, as you publish them. You can upgrade the plugin for greater functionality, but the free version is a good start.
The plugin also lets you post your older content at times you choose. This is useful if you have a number of articles which are already on your website. You can also use a social share plugin on your website to encourage your visitors to share your content when they see it. This can have a dramatic impact on the number of people who see (and share) your posts. See best social media share plugins for WordPress.
You can also manually share your content via social media and link back to it from other websites and your newer posts. When link to your own posts, you can also use deep linking. Deep linking is where you link to your post from the text keywords you originally intended your article to rank for. It can help Google understand what you intend an article to rank for in terms of keywords.
An example of this is: the power of email marketing, where I’m linking to a long tail keyword article I have already written on this website.
Article Marketing Websites
Another way to generate traffic to your blog posts and website is to write content on other websites. You can reach out to other websites similar to your own and offer to do guest blogging. Some website owners will post your content on their site in exchange for a link back to your own content.
Link building is an important ranking factor with Google and generally the more links you have to your site, the better. You can also build links from article marketing websites such as Ezinearticles.com and Hubpages.com. Writing for Ezine can give you more exposure in a few ways:
- You get traffic which comes directly from EzineArticles users.
- Links from your article help in your SEO campaign
- Other people can share your articles and must credit your link too, (hence more backlinks, more traffic)
Here’s an article I posted on Ezine Articles entitled: “What Is affiliate marketing and why you should use it?“
Posting Videos On YouTube
YouTube is another platform you can use to both generate traffic and boost your SEO score with Google. You can use a similar approach to YouTube as you do with your organic blog posts on your website. Upload videos and tag them with your main keywords. Link back to your blog posts under your videos in your description using keyword focused links (using your blog titles).
Although in the beginning the effect of this can be difficult to see, over time if you are consistent with all these strategies, you should see a steady rise in your blog traffic.
Blog Commenting / Quora
Two other strategies you can use are blog commenting and Quora.com. See also affiliate marketing on Quora. With Quora, you can find and answer questions which relate to your content. If appropriate, leave links to your relevant content in your answers. Quora has a strict no spam policy. But if you are careful, and answer questions thoroughly, Quora does allow links to relevant content to be left in your answers.
Quora links are however no-follow which means they don’t help with your SEO score. But many Quora users will click on your links and find your website. Plus, if you find questions you are an expert on, which relate to your business, links from your answers will bring relevant traffic to you.
Blog commenting is a another strategy you can use to build backlinks and gain some more exposure of your content at the same time. Don’t spam in your comments though because they are much less likely to be approved. Write detailed responses in your commenting strategy and read the content you’re commenting on before hand. So many blog comments I get are just deleted because they are not genuine. But if you make an effort with blog comments, they can help you build traffic to your content.
Finding Other Blogs In Your Niche For Commenting
To find blogs in your niche which are available for comments you can look for those with a plugin called Commentluv. Commentluv is a plugin you can also use to attract more people who do the same. It’s a plugin which lets you leave a link to your website along with your comment.
Here’s the link to the Commentluv plugin.
How To Increase Organic Traffic To Your Blog – Summary
So here’s a quick run down of how to increase organic traffic to your blog:
- Create quality content which targets long tail keywords within your niche and attracts the right targeted audience. Use Google’s keyword planner.
- Use an SEO plugin to help you write Search engine friendly content
- Use newer articles to link to older ones using deep linking.
- Market your own content using Revive Old Posts and Social Media share plugins
- Link to your content from social media and outside websites – EzineArticles, Hubpages, YouTube and other blogs and forums
- Rinse and repeat
See also get traffic to your website Free!
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